Recognizing the need for obtaining a more productive and balanced load factor in the everyday operation of electrical power generating utility plants, many organizations and state regulatory commissions have been proposing time-of-day, off-peak/on peak, season tariff structures for electric energy use. It was the general belief that energy pricing could possibly compel Americans to alter their lifestyle and reshape their electric time-use patterns to off-peak periods thus providing benefits to the utility and lower costs to the consumer. It is now, however, contended that pricing alone cannot produce these benefits. It is believed that if this were to be achieved, there must be devices that lend themselves to off-peak operation which allows the customer benefits of service without the penalty of requiring a change in lifestyle. In the home, potential off-peak storage equipment applications are space heating, water heating and possibly cooling and it is agreed that Electric Thermal Storage (ETS) applications as now used in England and other foreign countries in space heaters, if properly installed, could be the answer.
Since space conditioning and water heating typically accounts for 60 to 70% of the home energy consumption, if storage equipment were available to the homeowner for this use on an economic basis, special time-of-day energy pricing could be justified and benefits would result to both the consumer and the utility.
With this objective, a study was made of a storage space heater, widely used and accepted in Europe with over 5,000,000 devices presently in use in England, France and Germany. In simplest terms, these devices use a brick-like refractory core material as a heat sink contained in a heavily insulated metal cabinet with the storage capacity sized to be toally energized in an 8 hour period and to be capable of supplying all home heating needs during even the coldest 16 hour on-peak period.
A thorough study of the English ETS concept indicated that such systems could be economically viable in the United States except for several reasons, the principal of which is the different local code requirements, along with inadequate available storage capacity to match the range of American weather conditions.
Central to the concept of the English off-peak ETS furnace is the storage unit which is comprised of 3 basic sections, the storage core, the air-flow dampers and the structural support plenum, and pertinent to my herein disclosed invention is the improvement of the storage core section that is now employed in the various English type ETS test units in operation in the United States.